Now that the U.S. government has released parts of its We-Can-Kill-People-With-Drones memo, it's hard to miss why it was kept secret until now.

Liberal professors and human rights groups and the United Nations
were claiming an inability to know whether drone murders were legal or
not because they hadn't seen the memo that the White House said
legalized them. Some may continue to claim that the redactions in the
memo make judgment impossible.

I expect most, however, will now be willing to drop the pretense that ANY memo could possibly legalize murder.

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Oh, and yall can stop telling me not to use the impolite term
"murder" to describe the, you know, murders -- since "murder" is
precisely the term used by the no-longer secret memo.

The memo considers a section
of the U.S. code dealing with the murder of a U.S. citizen by another
U.S. citizen abroad, drawing on another section that defines murder as
"the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought."

David Barron, the memo's author, needed a loophole to make murder-by-missile a lawful killing
rather than an unlawful killing, so he pulls out the "public authority
justification" under which the government gets to use force to enforce a
law. It's a novel twist, though, for the government to get to use
force to violate the law, claiming the violation is legal on the
Nixonian basis that it is the government doing it.

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Alternatively, Barron suggests, a government gets to use force if
doing so is part of a war. This, of course, ignores the U.N. Charter and
the Kellogg Briand Pact and the illegality of wars, as well as the
novelty of claiming that a war exists everywhere on earth forever and
ever. (None of Barron's arguments justify governmental murder on U.S.
soil any less than off U.S. soil.)

In essence, Barron seems to argue, the people who wrote the laws were
thinking about private citizens and terrorists, not the government
(which, somehow, cannot be a terrorist), and therefore it's OK for the
government to violate the laws.

Then there's the problem of Congressional authorization of war, or
lack thereof, which Barron gets around by pretending that the
Authorization for the Use of Military Force was as broad as the White
House pretends rather than worded to allow targeting only those
responsible for the 911 attacks.

Then there are the facts of the matter in the case of Anwar al
Awlaki, who was targeted for murder prior in time to the actions that
President Obama has claimed justified that targeting.

Then there are the facts in the other cases of U.S. killings of U.S.
citizens, which aren't even redacted, as they're never considered.

Then there are the vastly more numerous killings of non-U.S. citizens, which the memo does not even attempt to excuse.

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In the end, the memo admits that calling something a war isn't good
enough; the targeted victim has to have been an imminent threat to the
United States. But who gets to decide whether he or she was that? Why,
whoever does the killing of course. And what happens if nobody ever
even makes an unsupported assertion to that effect? Nothing, of course.

This is not the rule of law. This is savage brute force in minimal
disguise. I don't want to see any more of these memos. I want to see
the video footage of the drone murders on a television. I want to see
law professors and revolving-door State Department / human rights group
hacks argue that dead children fall under the public authority
justification.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)